The Foolish Immortals by Paul Gallico ~ 1953. This edition: Michael Joseph, Mermaid edition, 1956. Stiff card covers. 223 pages.
My rating: 5.5/10
Paul Gallico was an author who loved himself a plotful gimmick – charwoman longs for and acquires a Paris couturier gown in Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris; young boy transforms into a cat in Jennie; a group of disparate (and desperate) characters are trapped inside an upside down luxury liner after it is submerged in the vortex caused by an undersea earthquake in The Poseidon Adventure – just to give a few examples.
In The Foolish Immortals the gimmick is that old quest trope, the search for the Fountain of Youth, or, as Gallico madly invents here, the wholly imaginary “Village of the Patriarchs” in Palestine-recently-turned-Israel (check out the date of writing) where the locals apparently live to fantastic ages, due to their consumption of a fungus which they cultivate in hidden caves.
Our shady hero is one Joe Sears, one-time high school football star of his hometown, Ventura, California, and now a middle-aged failure of a man, down to his last few dollars for the umpteenth time. Joe is what one might call averse to boringly honest work; he’s something of a con artist, if truth be told, always on the lookout for a profitable mark.
Joe twigs to the potential scam-worthiness of an American millionairess, one Hannah Bascombe, 75 years old and not very happy with the rapid march of time. Inspired by his random encounter with an evangelical preacher reciting the immense ages of the Old Testament patriarchs, Joe has an epiphany. How about he spin Mrs. Bascombe a tale of a secret to, if not eternal, then significantly longer life, to be found in the hills of the Holy Land? He’ll mount an expedition to be financed by the Bascombe millions, skimming the dollars as they go along. Joe’s not quite sure how he’ll end the project, but anticipates that he will be able to slip away quietly with well-lined pockets when Mrs Bascombe loses interest in what is bound to be a fruitless expedition.
Joe is aided and abetted by a youthful-looking ex-Commando, one Levi Ben-Isaac (yes, he just might be Jewish, and his heritage is crucial to the tale), who has a tragic wartime back story and a quest of his own. Ben-Isaac agrees to team up with Joe for the wooing of the elderly millionairess, though things are complicated for both men by the watchfulness of a sharp-witted young woman, niece (and potential heiress) to the rather-sharp-herself old lady.
Midway through, The Foolish Immortals turns into a rather decent road trip novel – gratuitous gun battle aside – with Gallico waxing eloquent about the scenic beauties of the bits of Israel they travel through, throwing in oodles of Biblical references and not a little spiritual-religious philosophizing. Both of which – the impressions of the Holy Land on Americans raised on the King James Version of The Bible, plus some thought-provoking debates on the nature of God and personal belief systems – are in all honesty, probably the best elements of what is otherwise a bit of a dud of a book.
Mrs Bascombe finds, if not exactly what she was looking for, an acceptable (or better?) subsitute for it. As do all of the other characters, ragged ends all neatly tied up, emotional issues all salved and soothed by each person’s personal encounters with God (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) while on their trek.
Paul Gallico’s A-list is a nebulous sort of construct at the best of times; I would hesitate to endanger it with the addition of The Foolish Immortals, so I’m going to gently deposit this one on top of the B-list pile.
He comes so very close to being very good indeed, does Paul Gallico. And I keep reading him, hoping he’ll transcend his inevitable banality, his tendency to weak and frequently mawkish endings. So close, but yet so far…
Leaves & Pages 
Goodness, you have been busy! I pop into L&P once a week (on Thursdays) and here I find you’ve got a plethora of new reviews up. And more from the previous week (which I someow missed when I read the Margaret Pedlar review a week ago).
Always a pleasure to come here.
A fair number of these are catch-up posts from January, Susan. I’m doing the self-imposed Century of Books thing this year, and part of my agreement with myself is that I would post about everything I read.
I struggled with writer’s (blogger’s?) 🙂 block last year; I’m pushing through it, just about on top of it – the words are coming easier, though sometimes I look at what I’ve written and say to myself, that makes no sense whatsoever!
I no longer keep any sort of pen and paper journal; this blog, and my nursery blog, are where it’s all at. I’ve always identified things that have happened in my life by what I was reading at the time, so even if there’s nothing really personal in a post it serves to memorialize the past for me, if that makes sense. Like looking at photos in a family album, the bits captured can bring the memories flooding back!
Yes, a pleasure to come here. My only experience of PG is The Snow Goose…
Thank you. Your kind words mean a lot to me! I am glad to give pleasure; a small return for the enjoyment I find in reading your postings in my turn. 🙂
Haven’t read The Snow Goose in many years – maybe not since high school? I seem to remember it being an assigned novel. Or at least there were a stack of them in my English classroom. (1970s.)
Magic mushrooms in my own backyard, so to speak! I must say, I am tempted. To read, that is – not to eat…
Rather bizarre “eternal life” plot device aside, there were parts of this novel which were rather good. I would be most interested to have the opinion of someone more familiar with the region under discussion; the American visitors in the novel showed some poignant responses to their experience of walking in the Holy Land which felt to me sincere and thought provoking. Caveat: very much a book of its time, this was, with the expected “takes” to a variety of issues.